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[Borsch]

Salut pilots! :S!:

This concerns the future of IL2:BoS and (hopefully) RoF, and I know that there are many talented mission makers lurking in these waters- why not discuss or even contribute to the future of IL2? 

The situation:
LOFT (the head of all IL2 now) has asked for a person with Photoshop +Flash skills to give him an interactive model of a more User Friendly Mission Editor that would make the community happy so he could look into it. http://forum.il2sturmovik.su/topic/234-?-?????????-?????????-???/?p=12643 (use google translate if necessary)

The reasons for bothering with this:

1. It concerns more than the proverbial 1% that use ME, just the 5 IL2:1946 campaigns created by FlatSpinMan alone were downloaded by around 120.000 people. http://www.mission4today.com/index.php?name=Downloads&file=search&sa=104

Altogether there are around 500 English language campaigns and 1000 missions available for Il2:1946 http://www.mission4today.com/index.php?name=Downloads&c=1
(+Russian, French, German, etc)
There are around 5 campaigns created by users in the 4 years that RoF was with us.

2. RoF editor is a powerful but difficult to use software. Professional IL2 campaign maker BlackSix (Roads of War was just one of  his works for Il2: http://www.1c.ru/news/info.jsp?id=8813) had unlimited access to RoF's programmers, but had to gave up after a month and a half  of trying.  Unlike IL2, current RoF ME requires one to not only be an artist, but also a programmer.  http://www.sukhoi.ru/forum/showthread.php?t=56886&page=242&p=1787763&viewfull=1#post1787763 (use google translate if necessary)

The already small proverbial 1% of  sim's userbase that create missions for other 90% of  offliners are *artists*, the requirement for *artists* to be programmers as well shrinks the user group much-much further (to 0.1% ?) - and this mathematically leads to decrease in quantity and quality of Campaigns/Missions output.

3. There is a connection between ME and plane sales (which is the main business for this sim maker) - good content created for a particular plane nudges a user to purchasing the said plane even if he had no interest in the plane itself to begin with.

4. From the history of flight sims we see that Static missions are more varied than Dynamically generated ones. The variety helps pilots to remain interested in the sim which again relates to purchasing planes.

Plan of Action:
The requirement is "interactive ME GUI that demonstrates what we users mean by improved user friendliness".

The best way to achieve this aim should be discussed among us, but it should probably be something like collecting ideas, making comparisons of  RoF editor to the famously user friendly ME from IL2 (1946,CLoD/LockOn?), collating and then producing the flash version.

For simplicity, its maybe best to post in the same forums - maybe ROF or IL2:BOS forums (http://forum.il2sturmovik.net/ ) although initially I will post this message in SimHQ, Aviaskins, ROF forums, Suhkoi, IL2:BOS, SAS, ATAG, 1C Yellow.

Thank you for your attention and lets cooperate for a future that will not limit us to DGEN Career and Quick Missions - let's face it, they get boring after a few months, and sim's life is always much longer than that

[offtop]N.B. If you have never created much in RoF ME, only played around with it somewhat, please do not post that it is the easiest and best thing since sliced bread[/offtop]

[max_thehitman]

Thank you for the news of interest, there might be possible artists in this forum that may offer their services
to you, but it would be very generous on the part of that flight sim to make some airplanes freely available for these
artists to start creating their "most wanted magic".
Many game industries have to remember and never forget that most Artists (with a capital "A" for all the respect they
so rightfully deserve) are not rich people and most of the time do not the have financial capabilites to buy airplanes just
so they can create their artistic works for others to enjoy and sharing them for free.
So it would be a nice gesture to the flight sim community for the Big-Game Companies to open up their hearts and make
the necessary arrangements for some things to be available to these artists.
As the old saying goes, .... "one hand washes the other and together, two hands are always better than one"   

[Borsch]

I think there is such system in place already, for instance Artist with a capital A Syn_Vander was allowed to sell his crafted static campaign through RoF shop, I believe some community translators/designers were paid by 777, if somebody is willing to make a new GUI for rof ME- it could be a very big job indeed, and Loft already discussed paying for it...

I am not part of 777+1C, I only posted news of a potential breakthrough as previously the devs have always resisted changing their ME. Now they are still somwhat sceptical that it can bring extra profit, but much depends on the community now as the offer to cooperate is on the table.